March 21, 2017, 09:55:32 am

Lots of folks have been finding the food-stamina situation particularly unpleasant lately and statements like 'I feel like I'm being punished for not having food' are common. Now it should be obvious that this game can and will 'punish' you for lacking LOTS of items like armor and weapons, not even the most daft person would ever say 'the game is punishing me for not having gear'.

The problem is that food is treated like a magic 'buff' that needs to be reapplied constantly. Armor dose not fall off your character every 5 minutes and need to be put back on, it is on until it is taken off or destroyed by damage. And we have seen a major overhaul in self buffs which became toggles, which love it or hate it DID remove mass buff spams before and during battle.

The food solution is to do something similar and combine some of the mechanics of both gear and toggle buffs. Having a slot on the paper-doll where a food stack (of any size you can carry) can be placed to indicate what is being eaten and which type of buffs one will be getting. The toggle buffing nature of food would be just that a simple toggle to either be nourished and slowly consume ones food timer or not, the only reason not to being for managing ones food supply. Foods items themselves retain their nature of having defined periods of time that they nourish for, but the whole stack of items would be summed to provide a total time remaining and individual items are consumed off the stack as needed.

In addition the food timer would only tick down when their are actually stats in need of regeneration, essentially the system automatically pauses the food buff timer when it is not needed, doing what the player could do but shouldn't need to both with because it is trivially simple. If foods provide any other benefits beyond regen of stats such as attribute bonuses then these should remain until the food is completely exhausted and removed from the paper-doll, in this sense the food acts like gear in providing this benefit in an always on state until it 'breaks', swapping the food our for a new type would be needed to update the effect.

Note that this system could work for several types of comestibles which would each have a slot on the paper-doll such as drink (Dwarven Ale!) and some think to put in ones pipe and smoke that could be for the mages to get some mana regen with which is notably absent from the system as it stands now.

I hate how food is mandatory now for anything besides bank staring. Before it was do or dont, not that big of a deal. Now its like your fucked without food.

Pretty unfair to punish a brand new character who runs out of stamina by the time they find the first goblin spawn to make the councilor happy because they dont have food, or didnt know of the huge cost of not having food buff active.

This stam regen while sprinting and food buff countermeasure tweaking is the first thing thats grinding my gears about new dawn.(people are bent about server location and wont play if ping too high; this is like the equivolent feeling here, i kind of dont want to play if im forced to eat a strawberry every 60se onds, or some longer duration food every time on cooldown). All was fine, up until this. It just has some sour taste. Like, its not working as intended. Seems silly watching the stamina bar drop, then increase, then drop, then increase like 2x a second while you sprint... as if the sprint stamina cost is having an epic battle with food buff regen.

Something should definitely be done. The punishment for not having a mandatory food buff should be adjusted.

I dont have any input upon the suggestion at this time, but i havent stopped brainstorming on it since the night i read the patch notes and said "pffff just make food baseline."

I dont have a problem with the new system, 5m dur food is pretty easy to farm and keep on you at all times. I think if they allow you to stack your consumables so you can stay nourished for long times until death it'll be just fine. But if they do so, I think there needs to be more mastery foods like sushi that can provide different short dura benefits upon first consumption that you can "skillfully" eat during pve/pvp engagements.

Instead the stamina drain and food attributes (cost, buff, duration) should be balanced!

Eating is not a skill either for the character or the player. Their is nothing being 'managed' by the need to reapply a buff other then consuming player attention span on an action which is trivially optimized. The soul of game-play is making interesting strategic decisions and their is no interesting choice between being effective vs being crippled, their is not even much of a supply management decision because carrying a huge stack of food is trivial as well.

Instead the stamina drain and food attributes (cost, buff, duration) should be balanced!

Eating is not a skill either for the character or the player. Their is nothing being 'managed' by the need to reapply a buff other then consuming player attention span on an action which is trivially optimized. The soul of game-play is making interesting strategic decisions and their is no interesting choice between being effective vs being crippled, their is not even much of a supply management decision because carrying a huge stack of food is trivial as well.

Same could be said about arrows and skinning knives, but I personally believe being prepared is a skill as is balancing risk reward (do you carry 100 berries or 20 jerky (same exact total weight and duration) as is weight management.

Really the only time I eat food now that I use to not to was when unsprinted riding and if anything they should just add a notice that chimes when food runs out like when attributes change.

For the reasons why we wanted food to become more necessary, you may read our message in this thread.A quick version is that aside from giving value, one of the reasons for the change is that food now increases your effective range on a mount to be infinite, and with some sprinting management, to be faster than before, while keeping the feeling that you traveled through a large and wide world. It should tie in well with the upcoming mount stamina system.

We'll just add to this conversation here with our thoughts on the topic:

With all that said, the argument about convenience is valid though, it does require to "baby sit" food during long travels, even if it makes them possible in the first place.Increasing the base duration of food would somewhat make it less tedious, but would lead to a power creep of food devaluing higher end cooks.However, something analog to an auto eating mechanic could make sense.

Here's a brainstorming thought:- When you eat a food item, its duration is added to your food buff.- The higher your current food buff is, the less a new food item adds to it.(diminishing returns)- Food quality, when introduced, would average out the buff.- Upon being downed, you would still lose the food buff.

The results would be:You could prepare for a trip, eat 10 piece of bread to get to your destination without thinking about it, or manage it and need only 7 piece of bread.In PvE you could stack up food as you drop it or early on so that you rarely run out and get the stamina losses. But should you make a mistake and go down, you would lose all you've stacked up.We remove the inconvenience, while creating a mechanic that could add depth to the system.

An extra note that was from comments later in the thread:Sushi buffs, and more variety of food buffs will be introduced. We're still debating if it will still act as a temporary effect, or also have a form of total pool and the more you eat one way or another, the more the buffs average out.

@Ub3rgamesSounds like your designing mechanics to retroactively give a reason for the eating of food through the current 'click-2-eat' UI. I also find the dynamic you describe shallows and uninteresting, because it is not a risk-reward balance, it is just inefficiency-tediousness trade off, the player is presented with the option to 'waste' resources to avoid having to click at just the right times later. A few pieces of bread do not constitute a meaningful amount of risked assets and the 'reward' is likewise an underwelming few pieces of bread that you saved.

The fact that foods (other then sushi) give exactly the same buff and the long duration foods would be 'devalued' under my proposal is exposing a flaw in the foods not a flaw in the proposal, the only reason for thouse foods was less tediousness which is a shallow and unsustainable justification for them. At the very least the elite foods could give a faster regeneration rate, as regeneration is the point of food it's only natural that 'better' food actually dose a better job at the one thing which is the point. We have already established the notion that people with better gear get a better regeneration rate so why not allow the same logic in food.

As for losing the food buff on dieing even if then rezed, I can't imagine why anyone would consider that good game play. We already risk everything on our character when we fight, in a PvP situation death means near certain loss of all gear, in pve rezing our friends and allies is one of the most exciting and comradery building parts of combat. Compared to this the wiping out of the food buff is a mere inconvenience and mostly just gimps the long duration foods by making it less likely we will actually get the utility from them, that why everyone brings bread to PvP fights. Given the gear like status that I envision food filling their is no reason it should be instantly removed when you die, though I could see some potential for a punishment such as the food buff timer running down 20x faster when your on the ground bleeding out, that would help make the long duration foods attractive for PvP and add the the rush of trying to rez people as fast as possible.

Lastly my equip-2-paperdoll based approach is designed to explicitly remove the possibility of mixing together potentially unlimited fractional food items and their buffs at the same time, something which your opening the door too in your last paragraph. I recommend you kill that thought with fire immediately as it would be a UI and balancing nightmare that you do not want to go down. The only mixing I envision is from the existence of other consumable slots such as 'drink' which function like any other armor slot.

Auto-eat? Might as well remove food then and make the buff baseline? What's next I can toggle auto-fire? where does it end?

@Ub3rgamesChecking&managing your stats is a skill whether you like it or not! And removing the aspect of staying fed through decisons (- checking your food buff and reapplying if needed) is dumbing down the game ever so slightly. Personally I think it is unnecessary, as getting high duration food isn't too difficult and you can just remember to eat every 15-20 minutes.

I find the new stamina consumption and management + necessity for food on all speeds of travel annoying. It doesnt add anything of value to the game from my pov. I would prefer if slow riding would regen stam just like it was before the change.